Running Injuries Explained And Overcome

If you run for more than a couple years, you’re likely to face injury at some point. That injury could be traumatic or due to overuse. It could be dehabilitating or a mere inconvenience. If and when you experience an injury, you are not alone. Running injuries are extremely common. As evidence, a full 20% of iRunFar’s 4,000-plus articles make mention of injury.

With injuries being such a large part of life as a runner, we thought it appropriate to collect the most useful of our articles on the subject. Below, we lay out articles that outline what an injury is and how to recover from one, as well as share the most poignant anecdotal observations from our writers.

To keep things manageable, this article does not collect iRunFar’s many other articles addressing specific injuries. For now, you can search for such info in the upper right corner of the website.

What Is an Injury?

Joe Uhan’s Anatomy of a Running Injury Part 1 and Part 2 are the foundational articles on running injuries on iRunFar. In Part 1, Uhan lays out how physical forces interact with human tissue in all the iterations of normal and abnormal forces as well as normal and abnormal tissue. In Part 2, he dives into how to fully and effectively treat a running injury… which I’ll summarize a bit more in the Injury Recovery section below.

While Ian Torrence’s Injury Recognition, Treatment, and Recovery could go into any of a number of categories in this article, I feel it’s best placed here for its succinct analysis of whether or not you’re injured. In the article, Torrence lays out three considerations in determining whether or not you’re injured, each of which he more fully explains in the article:

The act of running should not be a painful activity.

Understand the difference between adaptive and restrictive damage.

Running shouldn’t negatively affect the other aspects of your life.

Torrence’s article also delves into what to do if you’re injured, what treatment requires, how to know when you can start running again, and what to do if you’re continuously sidelined.

In Painting Bridges: Chemical Stress in a Running Injury, Joe Uhan discusses how chemical stresses from running contribute to overuse injuries. While he uses several extended analogies in the colorful article, he boils it down to the following bullets before going into how to reduce these chemical stresses:

Cortisol is a second-level hormone that is activated by moderate- to high-intensity stress. These can be both real–like races, hard workouts, long runs, heavy strength training, and any moderate- to high-intensity exercise including non-impact cross training–or perceived–such as psychological or emotional stress (work, relationship, family stress).

Injury Recovery

I consider Joe Uhan’s The Economics of Injury Recovery to be one of iRunFar’s core articles. Its simple premise of revenues and expenses works well when it comes to the body, injuries, and recovery. He writes, “We live in world of economics, so balancing black and red is a simple concept for most. In the health realm, we commonly utilize the economic model of ‘calories in, calories out’ for weight management. While overly simplistic for both, the same concept can be applied to tissue tolerance. Each and every activity has its cost, and is deducted from the tissue’s fitness ability, or revenue.”

Uhan also dives deep into injury recovery in Anatomy of a Running Injury – Part 2, mentioned earlier. In the article, he looks at three factors–mechanical, neuromuscular, and motor control–that play a role in running injuries before summarizing:

When injured, be sure to consider all three factors: Mechanical, Neuromuscular, and Motor Control.

Insist that your sports-medicine professional closely examine your run mechanics. If they won’t or if they don’t have that skill set, find someone who does. It may be the most important thing you do.

Don’t underestimate the importance of rest and gradual build-up in your return to training. Even perfection on irritated tissue can perpetuate pain.